Physical Threats

Even with a well-behaved workforce, there are still risks to a company’s data security. Threats can take the following forms:

• Theft of data or equipment – this means either unauthorised access and use of files, resulting in files being shared or copied without permission, or theft of the computing devices which hold the data.
• Malicious damage to data or equipment – an attacker could intentionally corrupt data (wipe it, alter it, change the relationships between records), or equipment can be intentionally damaged – this is why servers are often in access-controlled locations, in order to minimise the severity and opportunity for this type of attack
• Fire, flood, terrorism etc – these are the so-called ‘acts of god’: things that the user can’t prevent from happening, but can have mitigations in place to protect against, or lessen the impact.